Category: Private

The German team with the glorious name Gaussian Elimination Squad made the first rank in the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge! Each round of the challenge consisted of two parts: the first was a trivia challenge with 20 questions about computing, computer history, programming languages, and the SC conference series; the second part was a coding challenge, which gave each team ten minutes to speed up a piece of code they had never seen before as much as possible. On top of it all, the audience could watch what the teams were doing on two giant screens. Georg Hager, our team caption, has a blog post with all the details.

The Gaussian Elimination Squad represented the German HPC community, with members from RWTH Aachen (Christian Terboven and Joachim Protze), Jülich Supercomputing Center (Damian Alvarez), ZIH Dresden (Michael Kluge and Guido Juckeland), TU Darmstadt (Christian Iwainsky), Leibniz Supercomputing Center (Michael Ott), and Erlangen Regional Computing Center (Gerhard Wellein and Georg Hager). As only four team members were allowed per match, I was lucky to play together with Gerhard and Georg in all rounds, but the others helped us by shouting advice and answers they thought were correct.

I am not a designer. Neither am I an artist. But I appreciate well-designed, simplistic websites. Hence I decided to completely migrate to wordpress.com, this is where you ended up now. The domain I own, terboven.com, will soon point here, too. I transferred most of the content of my old homepage, my blog is staying here for quite a while already. I hope you like the new site as much as I do and that you will find here what you were searching for.

After a brief welcome address by the organizators (Wolfgang Dreyer from Microsoft and myself), Rudolf Lohner (KIT) gave an overview of the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) at the KIT. He was followed by the keynote speak from Microsoft, given by Xavier Pillons (Microsoft Corporation) on Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and Azure as well as Dryad/DryadLinq. We specifically asked for these two topics, and it turned out that Cloud Computing as well as Data-intensive Computing was the subject of many discussions during this event. After that, Axel Köhler (now NVIDIA) gave a glimpse into the current HPC developments at NVIDIA, including how a pure accelerator-driven supercomputer might look like. He was followed by Dagmar Kremer (BCC), who presented their solution for real-time super-computing on the desktop using Excel. This topic was also on the agendy by popular demand, and apparently the combination of the two keywords “Excel” and “HPC” makes many people interested. The first day was closed by Achim Streit (KIT), who gave his vision on HPC and the Cloud, outlining current projects around HPC as a Service (HPCaaS) for technical computing.

The evening event took place in the ZetKaeM restaurant, after touring the Media Museum, the world’s first and only museum for interactive art. We all experienced some funny exhibits🙂. Such an evening event serves well the role of a user group – leading to discussions and thought exchange over a good glass of wine.

3rd Parallel Programming in Computational Engineering and Science (PPCES) Workshop. This event will continue the tradition of previous annual week-long events taking place in Aachen every spring since 2001, this year from March 21st to March 25th. This year, the agenda is – as always – a little different from the previous one. Beginning with a series of overview presentations on Monday afternoon, we are very happy to announce the upcoming RWTH Compute Cluster to be delivered by Bull. Throughout the week, we will cover serial and parallel programming using OpenMP and MPI in Fortran and C / C++ as well as performance tuning addressing both, Linux and Windows platforms. Due to the positive experience of last year, we are happy to present a renowned speaker to give an introduction into GPGPU architectures and programming on Friday: Michael Wolfe from PGI. All further information can be found at the event website: http://www.rz.rwth-aachen.de/ppces.

4th Meeting of the German Windows-HPC User Group. The fourth meeting of the German Windows HPC User Group will take place in Karlsruhe on March 31st and April 1st, kindly hosted by the KIT. As in the previous years, we will learn about and discuss Microsoft’s current and future products, as well as users presenting their (good and not so good) experiences in doing HPC on Windows. This year, we will have an Expert Discussion Panel for which the audience is invited to ask (tough) question to fire up the discussion.

Windows HPC Deep Dive Seminar. Right before the User Group Meeting (see next paragraph) there will be a Windows HPC Deep Dive Seminar, hosted by the Fraunhofer SCAI at Schloss Birlinghoven in Sankt Augustin, jointly organized by the Fraunhofer SCAI and RWTH Aachen and Microsoft. The first day (March 8th) will cover an introduction into Windows HPC Server 2008 and a hands-on installation and configuration as well as advanced management and diagnostic tasks. The second day (March 9th) will focus on parallel programming on Windows, ranging from using the Microsoft and Intel compilers and performance tools to MPI performance analysis and system performance assessment. The third day (March 10th) is all about Visual Studio 2010 and how to use this great tool for parallel programming on Windows, as well as some aspects of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. All the talks will be given by speakers from Microsoft, Fraunhofer SCAI or RWTH Aachen. There are some attendance costs attached to this seminar, which include lunch and dinner.

3rd Meeting of the German Windows-HPC User Group. Following the Deep Dive Seminar (see previous paragraph) the third incarnation of the German Windows-HPC User Group Meeting will take place on March 11th + 12th at Schloss Birlinghoven in Sankt Augustin, kindly hosted by the Fraunhofer SCAI. As in the previous years, we got some experts from Microsoft to present about technical aspects of current and future products, as well as users presenting their (good and not so good) experiences in using Windows HPC Server 2008 and folks from industry explaining their solutions and products. From my point of view, the last two User Group Meetings were pretty successful and I really hope for many people showing up at this event. Attendance is free, of course.

2nd Parallel Programming in Computational Engineering and Science Workshop. Continuing the tradition of previous annual SunHPC events and last year’s PPCES, this year’s PPCES workshop will take place at RWTH Aachen University from March 22nd to 26th and cover parallel programming using OpenMP and MPI in Fortran and C/C++ on Linux and Windows platforms. This year we are going to include a half-day session on GPGPU programming as well. In general, we cover the basics of various programming paradigms, development environments and tools, performance analysis and tuning tools, as well as advanced parallel programming patterns and case studies, always providing enough time for the audience to try it themselves during the lab sessions. This course is intended for all audiences, the only prerequisite you should bring is basic programming skills in either Fortran, C or C++. You can register for all five days separately so that you can choose your favourite topics, of course you can stay for all five days as well. Besides speakers from our center we also got external speakers. All talks will be in English, the course is free for all audiences of course.

If you have any questions regarding any of these events, do not hesitate to contact me. Looking forward to see you there!

As announced in a previous post already, I was involved in two workshops attached to the HPCS 2009, hosted by the HPCVL in Kinston, ON, Canada. Being back in the office now I found some time to upload my slide sets. Obviously I can only make my own slides public.

Using OpenMP 3.0 for Parallel Programming on Multicore Systems [abstract]